Two five-second bursts of multi-color lights accompanied by unusual mechanical sounds
Just before 3:00am my wife and I were woken by a very loud and sudden noise outside our rather isolated rural house (1 home within a half-mile). The noise resembled the rough sounds of a very large grinding engine, but was overlayed with a rythmic "swishing" sound reminiscent of our dishwasher. It was loud enough and sudden enough to immediately alarm us into instant wakefulness and we looked out the window to see the sky illuminated by rapid flashes of red, blue, and green lights (not isolated in any specific area, just covering the 15-degrees of arc or so we can see between the eves of our house and the trees surrounding our home). The sounds and lights abruptly stopped after fix seconds or so. There was a pause of perhaps ten seconds while we tried to figure out what it could have been, and then the lights and sounds resumed and lasted for another five seconds. The power died sometime during these two events. We ran outside at this point, but the sky was completely clear (no cloud cover to reflect light effects from ground-level).
Five to ten minutes later we noticed the contrail of a high-altitude military jet coming from the direction of the Whidbey Island Naval Station and heading due east perhaps a dozen miles south of us.
My best hypothesis is that perhaps the lights and sounds were an electrical effect, such as a transformer blowing. The only problem with this theory is that all the local power lines are buried -- the nearest transformer is perhaps a mile away.
I hopped in the car to drive around on the chance that the lights and sounds had come somehow from an aircraft in trouble, since the Abbotsford B.C. airport is only a few miles away. During my drive through the cornfields I noticed that the power outage seemed restricted to an area of a square mile with our home near the center.
I decided to post this based on another post here from Surrey B.C. on July 20th. Surrey is only ten miles northwest of our home, and the sighting there was only a few days prior to our experience, and at approximately the same time of morning.
Just before 3:00am my wife and I were woken by a very loud and sudden noise outside our rather isolated rural house (1 home within a half-mile). The noise resembled the rough sounds of a very large grinding engine, but was overlayed with a rythmic "swishing" sound reminiscent of our dishwasher. It was loud enough and sudden enough to immediately alarm us into instant wakefulness and we looked out the window to see the sky illuminated by rapid flashes of red, blue, and green lights (not isolated in any specific area, just covering the 15-degrees of arc or so we can see between the eves of our house and the trees surrounding our home). The sounds and lights abruptly stopped after fix seconds or so. There was a pause of perhaps ten seconds while we tried to figure out what it could have been, and then the lights and sounds resumed and lasted for another five seconds. The power died sometime during these two events. We ran outside at this point, but the sky was completely clear (no cloud cover to reflect light effects from ground-level).
Five to ten minutes later we noticed the contrail of a high-altitude military jet coming from the direction of the Whidbey Island Naval Station and heading due east perhaps a dozen miles south of us.
My best hypothesis is that perhaps the lights and sounds were an electrical effect, such as a transformer blowing. The only problem with this theory is that all the local power lines are buried -- the nearest transformer is perhaps a mile away.
I hopped in the car to drive around on the chance that the lights and sounds had come somehow from an aircraft in trouble, since the Abbotsford B.C. airport is only a few miles away. During my drive through the cornfields I noticed that the power outage seemed restricted to an area of a square mile with our home near the center.
I decided to post this based on another post here from Surrey B.C. on July 20th. Surrey is only ten miles northwest of our home, and the sighting there was only a few days prior to our experience, and at approximately the same time of morning.
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Everson
USA
20 seconds
20 seconds
48.90
-122.33
unknown
WA
Occurred : 7/24/2002 02:50 (Entered as : 07/24/02 02:50) Reported: 7/31/2002 3:27:33 PM 15:27 Posted: 8/16/2002 Location: Everson, WA Shape: Unknown Duration: 20 seconds Characteristics: There were aircraft in the vicinity or aircraft chasing the object
Two five-second bursts of multi-color lights accompanied by unusual mechanical sounds